Catholic Bishops Demand All Businesses Be Given The Right To Deny Women Contraception Coverage
Catholic bishops and their GOP allies have been in an uproar ever since the Obama administration announced new rules that require employers, including most religiously-affiliated institutions, to cover contraception in their health plans with no cost-sharing. Republican candidates have accused Obama of waging a “war against religious freedom.” Rick Santorum went so far as to say Obama has put America on “the path” of beheading devout citizens.
The less shrill voices have implored Obama to “compromise” by broadening the religious exemption to let religiously-affiliated hospitals refuse women contraception. But the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has made it clear they’re not interested in compromise. According to a report in USA Today, they aren’t just demanding a broader religious exemption from the new contraception coverage rule — they want contraception coverage removed from the Affordable Care Act altogether:
The White House is “all talk, no action” on moving toward compromise, said Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “There has been a lot of talk in the last couple days about compromise, but it sounds to us like a way to turn down the heat, to placate people without doing anything in particular,” Picarello said. “We’re not going to do anything until this is fixed.”
That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for “good Catholic business people who can’t in good conscience cooperate with this.”
“If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by the mandate,” Picarello said.
In short, Catholic bishops are saying that federal laws shouldn’t apply to anyone who claims to have a religious objection to them. Houses of worship and other religious nonprofits are already completely exempt from the rule. It is only when religious institutions choose to go into business as hospitals and serve the general public that they are bound by the same laws as everyone else. Yet the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has promised a legal challenge.
But the organization does not speak for a majority of American Catholics, 52 percent of whom support requiring health plans to cover contraception. Several major Catholic universities and hospitals already offer contraception coverage.
By: Marie Diamond, Think Progress, February 9, 2012
“You’re No Better Than A Whore On The Street: Contraception Tales From The Kitchen Table
This is a really old story, but let me tell you anyway.
When I was first married, my mother-in-law sat down at her kitchen table and told me about the day she went to confession and told the priest that she and her husband were using birth control. She had several young children, times were difficult — really, she could have produced a list of reasons longer than your arm.
“You’re no better than a whore on the street,” said the priest.
This was, as I said, a long time ago. It’s just an explanation of why the bishops are not the only Roman Catholics who are touchy about the issue of contraception.
These days, parish priests tend to be much less judgmental about parishioners who are on the pill — the military was not the first institution in this country to make use of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” system. “In most parishes in the United States, we don’t find them preaching about contraception,” said Jon O’Brien of Catholics for Choice. “And it’s not as though in the Mass you have a question-and-answer period.”
You have heard, I’m sure, that the Catholic bishops are in an uproar over an Obama administration rule that would require Catholic universities and hospitals to cover contraceptives in their health care plans. The Republican presidential candidates are roaring right behind. Mitt Romney claimed the White House was trying to “impose a secular vision on Americans who believe that they should not have their religious freedom taken away.”
Let’s try to work this out in a calm, measured manner. (Easy for me to say. I already got my mother-in-law story off my chest.)
Catholic doctrine prohibits women from using pills, condoms or any other form of artificial contraception. A much-quoted study by the Guttmacher Institute found that virtually all sexually active Catholic women of childbearing age have violated the rule at one point or another, and that more than two-thirds do so consistently.
Here is the bishops’ response to that factoid: “If a survey found that 98 percent of people had lied, cheated on their taxes, or had sex outside of marriage, would the government claim it can force everyone to do so?”
O.K. Moving right along.
The church is not a democracy and majority opinion really doesn’t matter. Catholic dogma holds that artificial contraception is against the law of God. The bishops have the right — a right guaranteed under the First Amendment — to preach that doctrine to the faithful. They have a right to preach it to everybody. Take out ads. Pass out leaflets. Put up billboards in the front yard.
The problem here is that they’re trying to get the government to do their work for them. They’ve lost the war at home, and they’re now demanding help from the outside.
And they don’t seem in the mood to compromise. Church leaders told The National Catholic Register that they regarded any deal that would allow them to avoid paying for contraceptives while directing their employees to other places where they could find the coverage as a nonstarter.
This new rule on contraceptive coverage is part of the health care reform law, which was designed to finally turn the United States into a country where everyone has basic health coverage. In a sane world, the government would be running the whole health care plan, the employers would be off the hook entirely and we would not be having this fight at all. But members of Congress — including many of the very same people who are howling and rending their garments over the bishops’ plight — deemed the current patchwork system untouchable.
The churches themselves don’t have to provide contraceptive coverage. Neither do organizations that are closely tied to a religion’s doctrinal mission. We are talking about places like hospitals and universities that rely heavily on government money and hire people from outside the faith.
We are arguing about whether women who do not agree with the church position, or who are often not even Catholic, should be denied health care coverage that everyone else gets because their employer has a religious objection to it. If so, what happens if an employer belongs to a religion that forbids certain types of blood transfusions? Or disapproves of any medical intervention to interfere with the working of God on the human body?
Organized religion thrives in this country, so the system we’ve worked out seems to be serving it pretty well. Religions don’t get to force their particular dogma on the larger public. The government, in return, protects the right of every religion to make its case heard.
The bishops should have at it. I wouldn’t try the argument that the priest used on my mother-in-law, but there’s always a billboard on the front lawn.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, February 8, 2012
“A Moral Imperative”: Protecting Access To Birth Control Does Not Violate Religious Freedom
In many respects it is amazing that in 2012 there is a controversy over women’s access to birth control.
Let’s be clear, the current controversy over the Obama administration’s rules that require all employers who provide health insurance to provide birth control without a co-pay to its women employees, has nothing whatsoever to do with religious freedom.
It has everything to do with an attempt to take away women’s access to easy, affordable birth control, no matter where they work.
Birth control is not controversial. Surveys show that 99 percent of women and 98 percent of Catholic women have used birth control at some time in their lives.
No one is trying to require that anyone else use birth control if it violates their religious convictions. But the convictions of some religious leaders should not be allowed to trump the rights of women employees to have access to birth control.
The rule in question exempts 355,000 churches from this requirement since they presumably hire individuals who share the religious faith of the institutions in question. But it does not exempt universities and hospitals that may be owned by religious organizations, but serve — and employ — people of all faiths to engage in decidedly secular activities. These are not “religious institutions.” They are engaged in the normal flow of commerce, even though they are owned by religious organizations.
Some religious leaders argue that they should not be required to pay for birth control coverage for their employees if they have religious objections to birth control. This argument ignores the fact that health insurance coverage is not a voluntary gift to employees. It is a part of their compensation package. If someone opposed the minimum wage on religious grounds — say because they believed it “discouraged individual initiative” — that wouldn’t excuse them from having to pay the minimum wage.
If a Christian Science institution opposed invasive medical treatment on religious grounds, it would not be allowed to provide health care plans that fund only spiritual healing.
Many Americans opposed the Iraq War — some on religious grounds. That did not excuse them from paying taxes to the government.
The overwhelming majority of Americans oppose taking away the ability for women to have easy, affordable access to birth control. A Public Policy Polling survey released yesterday found that 56 percent of voters support the decision to require health plans to cover prescription birth control with no additional out-of-pocket fees, while only 37 percent opposed. Fifty-three percent of Catholic voters favor the benefit.
Fifty-seven percent of voters think that women employed by Catholic hospitals and universities should have the same rights to contraceptive coverage as other women.
No doubt these numbers would be vastly higher if the poll were limited to the employees of those hospitals and universities because eliminating the requirement of coverage would cost the average woman $600 to $1,200 per year in out-of-pocket costs.
But ironically, requiring birth control coverage generally costs nothing to the institution that provides it. That’s because by making birth control accessible, health plans cut down on the number of unwanted pregnancies that cost a great deal more. And of course they also cut down on the number of abortions.
That may help explain why many Catholic-owned universities already provide coverage for birth control. For instance, a Georgetown University spokesperson told ThinkProgress yesterday that employees “have access to health insurance plans offered and designed by national providers to a national pool. These plans include coverage for birth control.”
The University of San Francisco, the University of Scranton, DePaul University in Chicago, Boston College — all have health insurance plans that cover contraception.
And, finally, this is nothing new. Twenty-eight states already require organizations that offer prescription insurance to cover contraception.
Of course the shocking thing about this entire controversy is that there is a worldwide consensus that the use of birth control is one of society’s most important moral priorities. Far from being something that should be discouraged, or is controversial, the use of birth control is critical to the survival and success of humanity.
In 1968, the world’s population reached 3.5 billion people. On October 31, 2011, the United Nations Population Division reported that the world population had reached seven billion. It had doubled in 43 years.
It took 90,000 years of human development for the population to reach 1 billion. Over the last two centuries the population has grown by another six billion.
In fact, in the first 12 years of the 21st Century, we have already added a billion people to the planet.
It is simply not possible for this small planet to sustain that kind of exponential human population growth. If we do, the result will be poverty, war, the depletion of our natural resources and famine. Fundamentally, the Reverend Malthus was right — except that the result is not inevitable.
Population growth is not something that just happens to us. We can choose whether or not to reproduce and at what rates.
No force is required. The evidence shows that the population explosion stops where there is the availability of birth control and women have educational opportunity.
That’s why it is our moral imperative to act responsibly and encourage each other to use birth control. And it’s not a hard sell. Children are the greatest blessing you can have in life. But most people are eager to limit the number of children they have if they have access to contraception. We owe it to those children — to the next generation and the generation after that — to act responsibly and stabilize the size of the human population.
The moral thing to do is to make certain that every woman who wants it has access to birth control.
By: Robert Creamer, The Huffington Post, February 8, 2012
The “Inevitability” Challenge: Mitt Romney Has No Base
There was nothing inevitable about Mitt Romney on Tuesday night. And should he lose any other significant primary contests in the weeks to come, he won’t be the most electable, either. Indeed, Romney’s humiliating defeats in Missouri, Minnesota and Colorado this week have blown a potentially fatal hole in the argument that the least-conservative candidate would be embraced by the GOP’s conservative base because they simply have no choice.
What Rick Santorum’s upset victories proved this week has been true all along — that the former Massachusetts governor has no base of loyal supporters in the party, and that the most conservative voters are desperate for another choice. It was true when the party flirted with Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich. It is still true now. Though as the nominating contests began, Romney’s impressive organization and considerable resources began to pay dividends, he has failed to excite conservatives even where he wins. While turnout increased slightly in New Hampshire, it decreased in Nevada and Florida from totals in 2008.
Such weaknesses are hardly building blocks of a nomination, and are liabilities Romney must mitigate to win the nomination and then win in the fall. Without adequate conservative support and energy behind his candidacy, Romney would lose to President Obama — just ask John McCain. The most active and enthusiastic conservatives, who will be critical to voter turnout in the general election, rejected Romney’s inevitability this week and sent the message Santorum declared as he started his victory speech, that “conservatism is alive and well.”
Romney’s campaign writes off the non-binding caucuses and primaries Santorum won and notes that the delegate count, with Romney ahead 3 to 1, remains unchanged. Missouri’s primary was a straw poll, or “beauty contest,” and along with Minnesota and Colorado is a non-binding contest that doesn’t award delegates the states will choose at a later date. True. But Romney was supposed to win in Colorado, where he beat McCain 60 percent to 18 percent in 2008. And he lost to Santorum, 55 percent to 25 percent in Missouri. Having nearly 138,000 voters turn out for Santorum in the bellwether state of Missouri for a primary that didn’t matter clearly matters. After all, the entire vote total in Nevada was only 33,000. Santorum has now won more states than Romney — and, with the exception of Florida, the critical battleground states the party needs to win in November.
A Romney campaign official asserted Wednesday that only Romney has the “organization, resources and stamina” to win the nomination. Santorum isn’t disputing that: His pitch to conservatives is that a compromised nominee will be defeated. Neither Gingrich nor Romney can lead the GOP to victory this fall with the support they have expressed for TARP, cap-and-trade proposals and mandates for healthcare insurance, Santorum maintains.
But it isn’t just the mandate that makes Romney “unqualified” to debate Obama on healthcare, Santorum said this week. Even on the most potent new issue the GOP has against the Obama healthcare plan — the administration’s new regulations requiring religious institutions to provide birth control in their healthcare coverage — Romney is vulnerable. Though he decried this “violation of conscience,” it was the same “abortion pills” Romney now condemns that he supported as governor of Massachusetts, when he stated his belief that all rape victims should have access to such “emergency contraception.”
Romney should ready his money and organization for the coming contests, because he won’t be electable if he doesn’t get elected. And conservatives will try mightily to challenge whether inevitability is inevitable after all.
By: A. B. Stoddard, Associate Editor, The Hill, February 8, 2012
Catholics’ Enraged Response To Obama Birth-Control Policy Is Misplaced
From all the hysteria over the administration’s insistence that Catholic institutions provide insurance that covers birth control, you’d think it was a big change—but 28 states already have such laws on the books.
Mitt Romney has been railing again the Obama administration’s refusal to exempt Catholic-affiliated institutions like hospitals and universities from its mandate that health insurance cover contraception. “Such rules don’t belong in the America that I believe in,” he writes in a Washington Examiner op-ed. Perhaps no one told him that such rules were in place in Massachusetts the entire time he was governor, because as far as I’ve been able to tell, he never raised a word of objection then.
From the enraged response to Obama’s policy, one would think it represented some sort of radical break with the status quo. In The Daily Beast, Kirsten Powers suggests the administration is threatening to put Catholic institutions out of business. “One thing we can be sure of: the Catholic Church will shut down before it violates its faith,” she writes.
But many Catholic institutions are already operating in states that require contraceptive coverage, such as New York and California. Such laws are on the books in 28 states, and only eight of them exempt Catholic hospitals and universities. Nowhere has the Catholic Church shut down in response.
Time and again, when these laws were being considered, Catholic bishops and their sympathizers made the same sort of hysterical arguments we’re hearing today. “We will not be daunted by the abortion and contraception extremists whose aggressive agenda includes putting the Catholic Church out of the business of providing health care and social services throughout the state of New York,” Cardinal Edward M. Egan said at an Albany press conference in 2002, when New York was considering the Women’s Health and Wellness Act.
Nevertheless, the law passed—it was signed by Republican Gov. George Pataki—with exactly the same sort of exemptions we’re now seeing at the federal level. There’s a conscience clause that applies to Catholic churches, grade schools, and parishes, but not institutions that serve the broader community, such as universities and hospitals. The church sued, but New York’s State Court of Appeals ruled against it; in 2007, the Supreme Court let the ruling stand. Likewise, California’s Supreme Court upheld that state’s version of the mandate.
And yet, somehow, Catholic institutions have continued operating. Nationwide, major Catholic universities including Fordham, Georgetown, and DePaul all offer birth-control coverage. So does Dignity Health, until recently known as Catholic Healthcare West, the fifth-largest health system in the country. In Massachusetts, the six former Caritas Christi Catholic hospitals, which were recently acquired by Steward Health Care System, all complied with the state law.
Some, it is true, found ways to get around the mandate. Instead of buying insurance policies, they self-insured—essentially covering their employees’ medical bills from their own funds. The new Obama administration policy closes that loophole, though it may well open others. Speaking to Morning Joe on Tuesday, Obama adviser David Axelrod suggested that some compromise with the bishops may be in the works. “[W]e’re going to look for a way to move forward that both provides women with the preventative care that they need and respects the prerogatives of religious institutions,” he said.
Those prerogatives are important, but they don’t trump the rights of the general public. That’s not an extreme notion—it’s one that Romney subscribed to when he signed a law forcing Catholic hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims. Obama’s policy, says Sarah Lipton-Lubet, policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, “really is completely constitutionally unremarkable. There is a whole host of anti-discrimination and labor laws that institutions that operate in the public sphere like religiously affiliated hospitals and universities comply with, or are supposed to comply with.”
And make no mistake: health plans that exclude services used only by women constitute a form of discrimination. That’s why in 2000, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled that employers that cover prescription drugs but do not cover contraception are in violation of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Such employers have “circumscribed the treatment options available to women, but not to men,” it said. The EEOC’s ruling made no exemptions for religiously affiliated organizations. Indeed, in 2009, responding to a lawsuit, the EEOC ruled that the Catholic college Belmont Abbey discriminated against women when it refused to cover birth control.
“When employers provide fringe benefits to their employees as part of their pay that include preventative health-care services and prescription drugs, it’s sex discrimination to reduce women’s pay by not giving them coverage for health-care needs that they have,” says Marcia Greenberger of the National Women’s Law Center.
The Obama administration, then, was acting in line with several longstanding state and federal precedents when it issued these new regulations, something that’s been totally obscured amid all the caterwauling we’ve heard in response. “Women who work at hospitals or universities or social-service agencies with religious affiliation don’t need contraceptive access any less than women who work at other sorts of hospitals and universities and social-service agencies,” says Lipton-Lubet. “The ideology of their employers doesn’t affect their health-care needs and shouldn’t affect their health-care access.”
By: Michele Goldberg, The Daily Beast, February 8, 2012
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